President Obama and Mitt Romney spent a record-breaking $2 billion on their campaigns. Plus, Vincent van Gogh's 'Self-Portait' comes to L.A., and our fair city gets its first poer laureate, Eloise Klein Healy, LAUSD wants to make arts core to curriculum, but it won't be easy. Then, Friday Flashback, The Dinner Party and actor Robert Carlyle joins us to discuss his new film, "California Solo."
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• 7:15
According to reports filed late yesterday with the Federal Election Commission, President Obama and Mitt Romney spent $2 billion on their presidential campaigns. It's a record breaking number for a White House bid.
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• 4:23
Tri Ta laughs at the suggestion he’s a celebrity in his community, even though, seemingly, every Vietnamese American media outlet has called him for an interview.
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• 18:35
James Rainey of the LA Times and David Gura of Marketplace chew on the week's big stories, including the sequestration condundrum, George Bush's comments about immigration at a conference in Dallas, John McAfee's shenanigans in Guatemala and the death of NewsCorp's iPad-only newspaper, The Daily.
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• 5:44
We often hear about the decline of arts education in schools, especially with all of the budget cuts made over the last few years. Now, the L.A. Unified School District is trying to reverse that trend.
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• 7:58
The chief curator of Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum explains the historical importance of Vincent van Gogh's "Self Portrait," now on loan from the National Gallery of Art.
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• 8:21
The number of people crossing into the U.S. from Mexico illegally has dropped dramatically since peaking in 2007. But now, U.S. officials are starting to watch the flow of humans, guns and drugs at another frontier: the southern Mexican border.
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• 6:48
An increasing number of ethnic Roma, people otherwise known as "gypsies," have been seeking asylum recently in Canada. But the path they take to get there is quite curious: flying from Europe into Mexico, driving into California's Imperial Valley, working their way across the country to a small town in Vermont before heading north into Quebec.
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• 5:35
The 69-year-old is an author, publisher and educator. Chosen by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, she begins her term today. Listen to the poems she submitted for consideration & her chat with KPCC's Patt Morrison.
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• 6:08
Every Friday we sit down with the guys from the Dinner Party podcast and radio show to get the conversation topics for the weekend. On tap this week; a bird that builds in the complex "forced perspective" architectural concept, a restaurant that broadcasts negative reviews in the bathroom and a monument to the boll weevil.
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• 13:03
Scottish actor Robert Carlyle talks with Take Two about whiskey, his new film "California Solo," and roles that out him on the map.